'You're filming something. That's kind of the purpose, right?' 

From the dizzy heights of Borat (2006) and Jackass (2002), to the pandemic-inflected How to With John Wilson (2020), Bad Trip (2020) and slightly disappointing Borat 2 (2020), the twenty-first-century can't get enough of comedy that blends reality and the scripted. Perhaps the most successful of these productions is Nathan For You (2013-17), the show where Nathan Fielder uses his 'knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world', blending cringe-comedy and reality TV to create a light-hearted but prickly satire on American business and media culture. But with its final episode, 'Finding Frances' (2017), Nathan For You pulls us into a newly touching realm, where the line between construction and reality is thinner than ever. How does our fixation with the authentic reflect on our culture of constant performance, where social media makes us all into hidden-camera comedians? Is a 'New Sincerity' possible, in film as in literature, as the culmination of artifice? And if something moves us, perhaps even moves us to change our world, does its authenticity matter?